Codger’s Column: A memory?

After two years of marriage, my first wife thought we were still too shaky to have children, emotionally and professionally. We were both 23. She was a student, working in a doctor’s office, I was a reporter.

We argued briefly when she became pregnant; I liked the idea of fatherhood and didn’t think it would hamper my career. She’d be doing all the work. But even in 1961, I understood that it was her choice.

Through her medical connections, she found a Fifth Avenue doctor who would perform the operation for $500, which we could just about scrape together.

I was scared, for Maria’s well-being, of the consequences of acting illegally, that the newspaper might find out and hold it against me. I was also in some confused and twisted way disturbed by acting against the moral conventions of my society.

I felt like a bad person. These were wrenching feelings that bubbled back up all these years later as a most humane and personal constitutional right was attacked and then taken away.

I was righteously angry that clear, crisp fall afternoon as Maria and I walked to the doctor’s ground-floor office across from Central Park. I knew then that religious bigots and their mercenary politicians were standing in the way of our health and freedom but I was nowhere near sophisticated enough to realize it was part of an authoritarian plot to control all aspects of our lives.

I probably would have smirked at such seeming paranoia back then.

The doctor’s door opened before I rang the buzzer and the arm of an older woman — the doctor’s wife as I discovered later — shot out, grabbed Maria’s sleeve and pulled her inside. A quick kiss. Maria’s eyes were wide.

I had been instructed to leave the area and call in two hours, but after wandering in the park I found myself drifting back toward the doctor’s office. Reporters always stay near the action.

As dusk settled, cars, nondescript black and gray sedans, began to park illegally along Fifth Avenue and the side streets flanking the doctor’s office. They disgorged mostly women, stocky, athletic women in non-chic clothes. They weren’t local residents, I thought.

As they clustered on the sidewalk, I remember thinking they looked like a women’s semi-pro softball team I had once covered, as well as the women cops I had met recently on a magazine piece about a squad of Manhattan detectives.

I realized that this was a raid. I actually felt flushed with ice water. I made my way to a telephone booth from which I could observe the cops closing in on the doctor’s office.

What should I do? Warn the doctor? Less than an hour had passed since Maria had gone inside.

If they aborted the abortion, would that spare criminal charges? What if the operation had begun? Was she just settling into anesthesia? I imagined the doctor, scalpel in hand, panicking, causing damage. I couldn’t take that chance. No call. I waited and watched.

The cops swarmed the office door, went inside. It seemed like a long time before the office door opened again and cops came out with the doctor’s wife, then with a white-bearded man in a white coat, a teen-aged girl wrapped in a blanket, then Maria, pale and shaking.

Nobody stopped me as I ran to her, yelling, “That’s my wife.”

The cops were matter-of-fact. They said that if Maria accompanied them to Bellevue Hospital and submitted to an examination there would be no charges. She would need to appear before a grand jury. That would probably be the end of it.

I insisted on going to Bellevue with her. I sat in the chilly hallway for a long time. The cops were friendly. Several of them all but apologized — What can we do, abortions are against the law. Shrugs. I took Maria home. She slept for a day. There were visits and pills from a nurse at the doctor’s office where she worked.

Sometime later she testified before a grand jury. The doctor’s name eventually appeared in a splashy New York Post story. He was running an abortion ring, it said. It was considered a big bust for the cops.

And that was pretty much the end of it, also of the marriage a year later.

I thought of it all again when Roe v. Wade became law in 1973 and, with Maria’s permission, wrote about it in a boomlet of pre-Roe horror stories, supposedly never to be repeated. Well, here we are about to repeat them.

New York is currently spared the illegality of abortion, but what other rights of mine and my children and my grandchildren will be under attack? How will we keep them from being taken away?